Author: Joe Mullin

The online news and gossip site Gawker has begun the process of appealing the $140 million verdict a jury ordered it to pay last month for publishing a sex tape of Terry Bollea, better known as former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan.

The Gawker appeal is no surprise, as the company has said it will appeal since the verdict was delivered. In motions filed late Monday, the online media outlet has asked for the verdict to be thrown out or the damages "greatly reduced," according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Gawker lawyers argue the $25 million in punitive damages that was added on to the $110 million in compensatory damages would be "ruinous." The jury was told that Gawker Media was worth $83 million while its founder Nick Denton was worth $121 million.

Last year, Uber was sued by two women who said they were sexually attacked by drivers. On Friday, an Uber lawyer tried to convince a US federal judge to throw out the lawsuit, but she was unconvinced.

"The job being performed has nothing to do with the act," Uber attorney Josh Cohen said, according to a report in Courthouse News. Cohen tried to walk a fine line, saying that Uber is merely a "facilitator of transportation" and not a transportation company.

US District Judge Susan Ilston brought up a 1956 case called Berger v. Southern Pacific, which involved a female passenger who was raped by a porter on a Pullman train car. It was a case brought up by neither the plaintiffs nor the defendants, and at the Friday hearing, both sides didn't even seem to be aware of the case, according to a report from The Recorder.

In 2014, an East Texas jury ordered Google to pay $85 million to SimpleAir, a "patent troll" company with no business beyond enforcing its patents. It was a massive victory for the company's broad claim—that Google's use of push notifications in Android phones infringed its US Patent No. 7,035,914.

SimpleAir's victory, the largest patent verdict ever won against Google, has since fallen apart. Google appealed the ruling, and on Friday a three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held (PDF) that the lower court judge didn't interpret the patent claims correctly and that Google does not infringe.

The ruling is another signpost that while low-level patent trolling is thriving, the era of large patent troll victories may be waning. The chances of well-resourced tech companies like Google, if they're willing to fight through an appeal, appear better than ever.

After being prodded by a judge to swear off the practice, lawyers from Google and Oracle have agreed not to do any Internet research on jurors in their upcoming high-stakes copyright trial.

In a March 24 order (PDF), US District Judge William Alsup urged the two sides to make such an agreement. At that time, he indicated that Google was willing to forego researching jurors on social media, but Oracle's lawyers balked.

Looking at jurors' online information isn't unusual in high-stakes corporate trials these days, but Alsup nonetheless offered a pointed critique of the lawyers' intentions.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has advocated against ridiculous software patents for more than a decade, but it wasn't until last year that the organization took on a pro bono client accused of patent infringement. A little-used video website called Garfum.com sued Pennsylvania photographer Ruth Taylor, saying she was infringing US Patent No. 8,209,618. Garfum, owned by a New Jersey man named Michael Garofalo, says the patent was infringed by the photo contests Taylor runs on her website, Bytephoto.

Garofalo's lawyers demanded $50,000 from Taylor as a royalty payment. After they discovered that Bytephoto's income in 2014 was less than $500, they asked to see Taylor's tax returns. They dropped their demand to $5,000, and later to $2,500.

Rather than pay, Taylor got in touch with EFF, and the timing was right. Taking on any patent case was a potentially big commitment. Even one that ends quickly can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and cases that go to a jury trial can cost millions.

More than ever, websites are blocking users of the anonymizing Tor network or degrading the services they receive. Data published today by Web security company CloudFlare suggests why that is.

In a company blog post entitled "The Trouble with Tor," CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince says that 94 percent of the requests the company sees coming across the Tor network are "per se malicious." He explains:

That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers. A large percentage of the comment spam, vulnerability scanning, ad click fraud, content scraping, and login scanning comes via the Tor network. To give you some sense, based on data from Project Honey Pot, 18% of global email spam, or approximately 6.5 trillion unwanted messages per year, begin with an automated bot harvesting email addresses via the Tor network.

A graph in the blog post shows that nearly 70 percent of Tor exit nodes were listed as "comment spammer" nodes at some point over the last year.

In a second go-round of its copyright lawsuit against Google, Oracle is hoping to land a knockout blow. A damages report filed last week in federal court reveals that the enterprise-software giant will ask for $9.3 billion in damages.

In its lawsuit, Oracle argues that Google infringed copyrights related to Java when it used 37 Java API packages to create its Android mobile operating system.

The damages it's seeking aren't just more than the Java API packages are worth—it's far more than Oracle paid for the entirety of Sun Microsystems, which was purchased in 2009 for $5.6 billion. By way of comparison, Google parent company Alphabet earned $4.9 billion in profits last quarter, according to IDG News, which reported on the Oracle figures yesterday.

The perils of "distracted driving," particularly sending text messages while driving, has been well-reported. Now the New Jersey state legislature may soon consider a new threat—texting while walking.

New Jersey Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt has introduced a bill that would ban pedestrians from walking while texting, and the proposed legislation would bar the use of cell phones while walking altogether unless they're hands-free. For those who violate the walking-and-texting rule, Lampitt's bill allows fines of up to $50 or imprisonment of up to 15 days (the same penalties that the state imposes for jaywalkers).

If the bill passes, then New Jersey's rules for cell phone use would be the same for walkers and drivers. A total of 14 states, including New Jersey, bar hand-held cell phones while driving, and 46 states prohibit texting while driving, according to the National Council of State Legislatures.

One of the oldest and most profitable patent trolls, Uniloc, has been shot down. Its US Patent No. 5,490,216, which claims to own the concept of "product activation" in software, had all claims ruled invalid by the Patent Trademark and Appeals Board (PTAB).

The process through which PTAB eliminated the patent is called an "inter partes reexam," or IPR. The IPR process, created by the America Invents Act, is an increasingly popular and effective way for defendants to challenge patents outside federal courts.

The PTAB case against Uniloc's patent was filed by Sega of America, Ubisoft, Cambium Learning Group, and Perfect World Entertainment. The board found that every claim in Uniloc's patent was anticipated or rendered obvious by an earlier patent.

A South Carolina high school teacher has sued (PDF) the school district that employed her after she was pushed to resign when a student grabbed racy pictures off her smartphone.

Leigh Anne Arthur resigned from her job earlier last month when she was told she would face disciplinary proceedings because a student grabbed photos off her phone while she was on a routine hall patrol.

At the time, Arthur complained that she, rather than the student, was the one being punished. The student shared the racy pictures of Arthur with his friends as well. Arthur said the pictures were a Valentine's Day gift for her husband, and she forgot to erase them from her phone.